Joanna Baillie

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Standard Name: Baillie, Joanna
Birth Name: Joanna Baillie
Nickname: Jack
Self-constructed Name: Mrs Joanna Baillie
JB is best known for her stylistically and thematically innovative drama, published from 1798 and through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Her poetry is now also beginning to be appreciated and a scholarly edition of her letters is available in print and on line. She also published a poetry anthology. Whether regarded from the viewpoint of Scotland or that of London, she is one of the important writers of her generation.
Engraving of Joanna Baillie, circa 1800, seated against a draped background. Her white headscarf contrasts with the dark background.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Joanna Baillie thought the dialogue here very clever and natural.
Grey, Barbarina Charlotte, Lady. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray, 1908.
152
Literary responses Mary Howitt
Among much critical condemnation of The Seven Temptations (and particular harshness from William Jerdan ),
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press, 1952.
32
the Athenæum acknowledged that we have gone through the whole volume with sincere pleasure, and judged that MH exhibited...
Literary responses Anne Grant
The pension was granted following the petition of Sir Walter Scott (who had praised her writing at the end of Waverley),
Perkins, Pamela. “Anne Grant and the Professionalization of Privacy”. Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750-1850, edited by Emma Clery et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 29-43.
32
Francis Jeffrey , Henry Mackenzie , and others. At first AG rejected...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
She was very disappointed when Scott never acknowledged this tribute. After Wallace appeared, Joanna Baillie wrote to him reminding him of this lapse in manners and implicitly that it was his own fault that Wallace...
Literary responses Anne Bannerman
After her death AB was quickly forgotten. Yet literary historian Stuart Curran has recently noted the influence of her poetry on Dorothea Primrose Campbell . Critic Adriana Craciun , writing for the website Scottish Women...
Literary responses Eliza Fletcher
She received letters of praise and congratulation on this publication from a number of distinguished pens. Anne Grant wrote characteristically that they far exceeded my expectations. She had expected exalted moral feeling, purity of sentiment...
Literary responses Mary Howitt
In the year this volume was published Queen Victoria sent one of her ministers, George Henry Byng , a copy of it. Joanna Baillie praised it warmly.
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press, 1952.
111
None of MH 's hymns, however, appears in modern collections.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London, 1992.
140-1
Literary responses Henrietta Maria Bowdler
Joanna Baillie called this novel in parts an interesting story very well told, but found fault with the moral of the lesson,
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 471
which, she observed, did less for the cause of single women...
Literary responses Elizabeth Ham
Joanna Baillie approved the title poem, but apparently for the sake of the dedicatee. Whoever the Author may be I wish the work success with all my heart.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 203
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Walter Scott never answered when Holford sent him a copy of Wallace for comment, and was apparently scathing about the poem in remarks made privately to Joanna Baillie.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 328
Early the next year Baillie
Literary responses Margaret Holford
The reception of this second long poem was far less favourable than that of Wallace. The Monthly Review denied it literary merit while granting it some potential literary-historical interest. The poem was, wrote the...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Though the first review to appear, in the Monthly Repository, expressed admiration (and some anti-war feeling),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
476
other responses were disapproving, even vitriolic. Many cited the allegedly unpatriotic tendency of the poem in terms...
Literary responses Fanny Kemble
In its review the Athenæum placed Kemble in the ranks with Joanna Baillie and Mary Russell Mitford , though her published original contributions in this form are only three—her school-girl essay which became the play...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Joanna Baillie , to whom the author sent the volume, liked it on the first reading, and still better on the second. She found the title poem truly beautiful, full of striking & pleasing, melancholy...
Literary responses Mary Brunton
This novel was reviewed at the beginning of the next year.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
5th ser. 1 (1815): 84
When the Baillie sisters re-read it aloud in 1840, Joanna found the story well imagined and the copious authorial...

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